Over the last few decades, the fast food and restaurant business has greatly increased the use of poultry products to meet the demand of its customers. Many new product forms have arisen wherein the outer skin is removed from the underling meat portion before the product is prepared or processed further. This skinning of poultry product had largely been done manually in the industry at significant labor intensive cost, the potential for accidental injury, and at a certain level of inconsistency of performance naturally attendent with any manual chore of this type.
The prior art includes various forms of skinning machines designed to remove the skin from fish product or animal meat. One example of a membrane removal apparatus for meat products is found in U.S. Pat. No. 4,292,710. This machine includes a knife edge and gripper roll provided with elongate rows of parallel serrations to strip membrane from steaks and the like and mentions using a similar apparatus for pork bellies. Similar machines are used to skin pieces of poultry product wherein the knife edge cuts or slices the product to remove the skin from the product prior to gripping the loosened skin. However, this type of apparatus tends to cut into the underlying meat and results in a loss of yield of the underlying meat.
Therefore, these prior art machines are not well-suited for skinning poultry product because the nature of the skin and the texture of the meat is not satisfactorily adapted for the same treatment or handling as fish and/or animal meat products. Therefore the poultry industry has continued to experience problems associated with automatic skinning of poultry products, such as lower yields, which have not heretofore been solved by those of ordinary skill in the art.